I can't believe I made myself sit through the whole movie!

Rating: 4/10 (26 February 2009)

OK, based on a story by HG Wells (allegedly), directed by Michael Bay, starring Steve Buscemi and Ewan McGregor. Could have been interesting. Turned out awful. And just farrrr too long.
You have to hand it to Michael Bay. He can turn any plot into a Michael Bay movie. You fax him a script about, say, an elderly Moldavian lesbian finding true love amidst the Biafra famine, and bang, there'll be a car chase with helicopters that ends up in a disused warehouse (just where does he find all those disused warehouses?). Here he does Kafka. And dystopic science fiction.
The movie starts out in an eerie ultra-modern environment in the near future. If you don't instantly get the feeling that "things might not be as they seem" you should check your pulse. I saw this on DVD and paused it after 45 minutes, and actually had a bad dream afterwards. Then our heroes escape to the real world and the movie gets interesting for about ten minutes, mainly due to the increased screen presence of Steve Buscemi. Then it goes into terminal coma again. It looks nice and all, but it's never engaging and just too damn ridiculous.
My word is to avoid this; people who want action will be annoyed about all the tedious "critical reflection of our society today" bits, people who want deep, introspective, mind-boggling stuff will just not buy into the story and their minds will go unboggled. This is the stuff that Uwe Boll always gets castigated for. Thanks for reading.